Tier One Wild (42 page)

Suddenly a vehicle’s engine fired and tires spun on gravel. Kolt and Slapshot ran forward and spun around the side of the garage, just in time to see a red van drive away. In the passenger-side window Kolt saw the unmistakable face of a Caucasian with short brown hair.

David Wade Doyle.

Raynor raised his weapon to fire, but a burst of rounds kicked up around his feet, fired from a position in the dark near the security fence. Kolt dove back behind the corner of the garage.

When he stuck his head back around, the van had passed behind the garage and shot out the back gate of the substation property.

Near where the van had been parked, a man stood with an SA-24 launcher on his shoulder. Raynor raised his weapon and fired a half dozen rounds into the man, who fell backward. The heavy launcher broke apart on the cement drive.

Kolt looked back to his men. “We need wheels!” he screamed.

Slapshot ran to a blue Dodge Durango parked under the awning next to the garage. A heavyset Mexican lay dead next to it, a shotgun still cradled in his arms. Slapshot opened the passenger door and looked in. “Keys in this one!”

Kolt ran around to the other side and jumped in, while behind him the rest of his men kept up the fire on the Zetas’ position out near the security fence.

Kolt and Slapshot drove out of the gate to the east, in pursuit of Doyle and his missiles.

*   *   *

With the rotor of the crashed Black Hawk still slowly spinning to their left, Rocket, Digger, and the rest of the men from Texas two-two were in the middle of a heavy firefight with an unknown number of enemy just up the road. All three TerraStar trucks had stopped in the road, along with three other vehicles. Men had poured out of them and they all scrambled to get off the blacktop and into the brush. Some made it. Many did not.

Digger reloaded his HK and moved up the southern side of the road. He’d killed two Zetas here and, along with the three men behind him, he closed on the wrecked-out convoy in front of him.

Rocket was on the northern side of the road. Two of his men had been hit and were being treated by a third, so he kept up the fire on the trucks in front of him.

Roscoe, the Belgian Malinois, was with them as well. His handler wrapped a field dressing quickly on the biceps of a wounded recce operator, while Roscoe barked.

As Rocket turned to check on the status of his injured mates, he heard someone shouting in Spanish, not far away in the low bushes. He turned back and shone his light, catching a single Zeta, obviously wounded in the stomach, stumbling out of the foliage. The man saw Rocket and raised his empty hands, so the Delta operator just motioned for him to drop to his knees and then onto his face.

The wounded and disoriented man complied.

Now Rocket looked to the sky. The lights of Nuevo Laredo were bright in the north, and in these lights he saw four Little Bird helos coming in low and fast. He hoped like hell the 160th pilots would be able to identify all the different gaggles of armed men out here in the dust, but he did more than hope. He immediately activated an infrared strobe on his helmet, and he ordered his men to do the same.

On the southern side of the road Digger had moved to within fifty feet of the TerraStars by the time the Little Birds swooped down from overhead. He and his men activated their IR strobes, and then Digger reengaged the fighters around the trucks. The shooters in the brush near the SUVs threw down their weapons and threw up their hands as soon as they saw the helos. Two of the four Little Birds were armed with rocket pods and machine guns, and the copilots on each bird held M4s out their doors toward the threats below.

The four helicopters hung like bees in the air, not twenty feet above the earth, and they covered everyone still alive from the convoy.

*   *   *

Kolt and Slapshot were a mile southeast of the substation now, still in hot pursuit of Doyle and the van. They found themselves on a disused gravel road that ran straight to the east.

“Looks like they are running for the border,” Raynor said.

“Roger that.”

Kolt felt certain that they would continue on this road all the way to the Rio Grande, which wasn’t much more than a wide bubbling brook here, especially during the summer. He thought Doyle would try to make his way across in the truck or else dump the truck and the SAMs and cross over himself.

But when the dust ahead of him drifted away, he realized Doyle had turned to the south. He saw the red van head into a brush-covered field off to his right, bouncing over the heaviest foliage as it raced on.

Kolt turned the wheel hard to the right and followed, just as a man leaned out of the van’s passenger window and fired a burst from an AR-15.

Raynor pulled farther to the left to shield himself and Slapshot from the van passenger’s field of fire.

Within another minute of hard off-road driving, Kolt and Slapshot realized that they were on an old track that ran along a dry creek bed that went to the southwest.

Kolt called out to Slapshot, “This is Arroyo del Coyote, it heads straight to the border.”

Even though the track was bumpy, Kolt pushed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The Durango shot forward. Rocks kicked up by the tires banged the undercarriage of the truck and it sounded like the vehicle was taking sustained fire from a belt-fed machine gun.

“Contact front!” Slapshot shouted, surprising Kolt, who looked forward to see a bend in the creek, and the road that ran alongside it, some one hundred yards ahead. Standing on a rise at the turn was a small group of men, and they seemed to be armed. The van passed them by at high speed.

“Who the hell…” Kolt began to ask, but as soon as the last word left his mouth he understood. Doyle had led him right to the Zetas who’d squirted out of the substation in the two beater cars. Now they were parked here at the creek, and they were ready to fight.

Before he could hit the brakes on the Dodge SUV, a plume of smoke appeared behind the man on the rise, faint in the glow of the dawn, but then it grew into a bright plume of fire. Kolt knew a rocket-propelled grenade was on its way. The finned rocket shot over the hot dry earth and raced toward his vehicle at an initial speed of 115 meters a second.

Slapshot saw it, too. He screamed, “RPG!”

Kolt wasn’t sure if the rocket was going to miss or pass by, but he knew he could not wait to find out. He jacked the wheel to the left to get out of its path, sending the black Durango off the track and down a steep hill toward the creek bed. The grenade impacted the dirt road right behind them and the explosion smashed the rear windows out of the truck and filled the interior with dust and flying glass and rock.

Raynor and Slapshot both held on as the truck careened out of control. Kolt tried to hit the brakes but the Durango was already tipping over as he did so. It slammed onto its left side and slid down the hill farther, then flipped onto its roof. Broken glass and small river stones assaulted the men as they rode the truck farther down into the gulley.

The SUV came to rest on its right side at the bottom of the creek bed.

It took Raynor several seconds to regain his wits. He felt blood streaming across his face, and his rib cage hurt like hell. On top of this, his seat restraint was all but cutting off the blood supply to his brain. He fought for several seconds to get the belt off his neck.

Then he looked down at Slapshot, below him as the truck lay on its passenger side. He could barely make out his friend in the low light.

“Slap! You okay?”

Slapshot was not okay. His face was covered in blood, and his right arm was broken cleanly just below the elbow. It hung in a grotesque fashion, like he had an extra joint in the appendage. The big operator’s eyes were closed and his mouth hung open.

He was either unconscious or dead.

The passenger side of the vehicle was now embedded in the river rock and broken earth. Fast drips of blood ran down from Racer’s face and hit Slapshot below him, where it mixed with Slapshot’s own blood, creating a constant rivulet of red that drained onto the white stones.

“Slapshot! Sergeant! Jason!” Kolt kept shouting at his mate, trying to get a reaction.

But between his shouts he heard multiple sets of footsteps racing toward him.

He jacked his head from side to side, looking around the vehicle for either his or Slapshot’s HK416, but he could not find either weapon anywhere. He pulled his Glock 23 pistol from the holster on his chest. He knew that, unless the Zetas crossed directly in front of his smashed windshield, he would not be able to defend himself until he could get out of his seat.

Then low thumping of a rotary-winged aircraft caught his attention. Raynor could tell a helo was approaching from behind where he lay.

Gunfire erupted from multiple points around him. He tried again to get his seat belt off, but he could not. He just hung there, his eyes spinning left and right, looking for threats, while he continued to yell at Slapshot. “Wake up, brother!”

Just moments after the shooting stopped and the sounds of the helo rotors blocked out even his own shouts, he heard the sound of someone climbing up onto the Durango. A man leaned over, looking down into the driver’s window.

“Boss?” it was Digger.

Kolt spoke, his voice tinged with the pain in his side. “Slap’s bad! Get him out through the windshield and then worry about me!”

“Right.” Several operators moved into view now, slung their rifles behind their backs, and started pulling on the broken windshield of the Durango to begin extracting Slapshot.

A minute later Kolt found himself on his back in the creek bed. Digger was crouched next to him, working on Slapshot on the dry stones by the SUV. Steam poured from the vehicle into the morning, obscuring Raynor’s view of the helicopters circling overhead.

Kolt tried to sit up but the pain in his ribs stopped him.

Digger began CPR and chest compressions on Slapshot.

Raynor lay on his back, his men around him. His rib cage hurt; from the agony he felt with each breath he was certain he’d broken two or three ribs low on his right side.

“Where is Doyle?” Kolt asked.

Rocket had arrived in the creek now. He said, “He’s gone. He didn’t go for the border. His van made it to Highway 2. He could be back in Nuevo Laredo, or heading the other way. We’ve lost him.”

Kolt struggled back up to his elbows. “He can still get over. We need to alert Homeland Security!”

“Already done, boss.”

“Divert the ISR.”

“Done, too. We’ve demo’d forty-six SA-24s. The rest must be with Doyle.”

“We have Little Birds?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going after them in the city.” Raynor said this with a wince, and he grabbed his side.

“Negative, sir,” Rocket answered back. “Slapshot needs immediate medical evac. The Texas two-two crew needs immediate medical evac. We’ve lost both Black Hawks. One ate a SAM and the other crashed-landed over in Rio Bravo. And Digger hasn’t checked you out yet, so you need to lie your ass back down. You could have internal injuries. We’ve been recalled back over the border. We’ll have to ferry in the Little Birds, make two trips.”

Kolt shook his head. It hurt to do so. “We have to get the Little Birds up to search for—”

“They’re gone, boss! We don’t have the assets to track them in the city now.”

A Little Bird landed in the creek bed on the other side of the Durango. Kolt turned his head back to Slapshot. The dust kicked up by the rotors swirled between Kolt and the badly wounded master sergeant, but Raynor could make out Digger frantically performing mouth-to-mouth on the big man.

THIRTY-SIX

Four days after fleeing Nuevo Laredo in the red van, David Doyle, Miguel, Jerry, and Tim sat in the bowels of a semi-trailer waiting to make the crossing over the border from Agua Prieta, Mexico, into Douglas, Arizona. With them were twelve Igla-S missiles, interspersed in a shipment of Buick Regal radiators from a GM factory in Hermosillo.

Agua Prieta was hundreds of miles from Nuevo Laredo, and to get there Doyle and his men first drove blindly back into the interior of Mexico, where they stole a new van at gunpoint from a commercial driver, and then shot him dead by the side of the road so that he could not talk later. They then found a place to hunker down in Hermosillo, and here David spent two days on his satellite phone, frantically working his contacts over the border in the United States as well as back in Yemen and Dubai. He urged his masters in AQAP to pay the Zetas as much Pakistani heroin as they wanted to help him get into the United States, even though the loss of sixteen of their gunmen and worldwide attention to their defeat by American military forces in Nuevo Laredo had seriously hampered AQ-Zetas relations.

At first Doyle’s masters were reluctant to continue supporting his mission. He had, after all, lost more than three-fourths of his surface-to-air weapons, and all but three of his original thirteen operatives. But David persisted, insisting that, if he could only receive help from the Mexicans to get him into the U.S., then there he could use sleeper agents that he was already in contact with to help him achieve his main objective.

He would not need sixty weapons to bring down the American government. No, he could do it with twelve.

Ultimately the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was persuaded to do as Daoud al-Amriki asked by the simple fact that he said he would try it anyway, with or without the support of the Mexicans. AQ could work with him a little more, lose a little more heroin, to ensure his success in getting over the border. Or they could give him no support and risk suffering the incredible negative publicity of failure if the remaining cell members and their weapons were caught or killed trying to make it over the border.

AQAP contacted the Zetas, acquiesced to their demands, and then Doyle, his three men, and his twelve Iglas were picked up in Hermosillo and driven to the border.

In the little conversation he’d had with the Zetas, David had learned that they had paid agents working at both border crossings, and the truck they were in was cleared under NAFTA rules to enter the U.S. and continue into the nation’s interior.